Books: A Loser's Scrapbook

I FLEW FOR THE FUHRER (213 pp.)—Heinz Knoke (translated by John Ewinq] —Holt ($3).

Carved into the memory of every combat pilot are moments of total recall—the unforgettable glimpses of a foeman starting to smoke, the inescapable sounds of the typewriter-tapping of tracer on fuselage and rudder. Captain Heinz Knoke, winner of Nazi Germany's coveted Rit-terkreuz and the youngest squadron commander in the Luftwaffe, pinpoints his most vivid memory high above Helgoland, one July day in 1943. In I Flew for the Führer, Knoke tells how his Messerschmitt squadron loaded up with 500-lb....